The moon could
serve a much greater purpose than just
being Earth's natural satellite. In
November of last year, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration announced the discovery of lunar water.

A release by
NASA and a report published
today as six papers in the journal Science reveals
that there is more water on its surface than was previously thought.
Members of NASA's Apollo missions space team also discovered trace
amounts of silver, along with mercury, gold and other
elements and compounds, on the near-side of the moon.

“We
didn’t know the moon after all,” said Peter Schultz, a planetary
geologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and
co-author of the papers. “It’s like there was a different face
and it was hidden in a treasure trove.”

"There's
this archive of billions of years (in the Moon's permanently shadowed
craters)," Schultz said. "There could be clues there to our
Earth's history, our solar system, our galaxy. And it's all just
sitting there, this hidden history, just begging us to go back."

The
quantity of water found was 50 percent more than was first
estimated.

"It's really wet," said Anthony
Colaprete, a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett
Field, Calif. and also a co-author of the Science papers.

The
moon is wet, scientists report, but the moon's hydrosphere is nothing
like that of the Earth's. The total mass of the targeted lunar
crater's soil is believed to contain roughly 5
percent of water ice. In some areas, water was confirmed
as mostly
pure ice crystals.

And while the moon's water supply has
been described as sparse
and not liquid, scientists believe that this latest data is
promising enough to set up a station on the moon.

China, India
and Japan are currently making plans to land on the lunar orb, but
the U.S. won't take part in the effort for at least ten years. While
President Barack Obama has given the go-ahead for a manned trip to
Mars, he recently canceled a U.S. program aimed at returning
astronauts to the moon.

Japan hopes to set-up an
unmanned base within a decade, China plans to send astronauts by 2025
and India has set its sights on a lunar landing by 2020.

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